Why Would Anyone Choose the Pill That Makes Them Fail?

In 1978 the psychologists Steven Berglas and Edward Jones asked college students to choose between two drugs before a retest: one that allegedly impaired performance on problems like the ones they had just done, and one that allegedly improved it. The odd result was that a group of the men picked the impairing drug. Self-handicapping is the name for that move, creating an obstacle in advance so that failure has somewhere else to point. Staying up too late the night before something important is the version most people run on themselves.

What did the drug-choice study actually do?

The study appeared as Berglas and Jones, “Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978, volume 36, pages 405 to 417. It reports two closely related experiments with college students.

Students worked on soluble or insoluble problems. Everyone then got success feedback, which created two situations. In one, the success looked earned, because it matched real knowledge. In the other it looked accidental, because it was not contingent on how they had performed. A retest on similar problems was promised, and before it came the choice that was the main measurement: a drug said to interfere with performance, or one said to enhance it.

Males in the accidental-success condition were alone in preferring the performance-inhibiting drug. The authors’ reading was that they wanted to externalize a probable failure on the retest. Experiment 2 replicated that preference and showed that the success feedback was critical to it.

The logic is easier to feel than to state. Someone who has just been told they did well, without understanding why, has the most to lose. A bad retest would reveal the first result as a fluke. A pill gives that retest a different explanation.

A companion paper by Jones and Berglas, “Control of attributions about the self through self-handicapping strategies: The appeal of alcohol and the role of underachievement” (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1978, volume 4, pages 200 to 206), set out the theory and pointed it at drinking.

Is staying up late a self-handicap?

It fits the definition, though the late-night version has not been tested directly. The structure is the same as the pill: a cost taken on before the event, which is blamed afterward. A presentation goes badly and the story is that sleep was short, which is a very different sentence from “I am not good at this.”

The late night also pays a second dividend that Jones and Berglas’s framework includes. If the presentation goes well anyway, the person looks talented in spite of the deficit.

Sleep loss makes a convenient handicap because it is real, socially accepted and slightly glamorous. Nobody asks for proof of a bad night. The same goes for the unprepared evening and the alarm that was set but never quite believed. A related account of why people give up sleep is in revenge bedtime procrastination, and the research on delaying bed versus delaying sleep in bed is laid out in two kinds of bedtime procrastination. Those describe the habit; self-handicapping describes one thing it can be for.

How well does the research hold up?

Mixed. The original finding was narrow: it appeared for men, and for women the first experiment did not show it. Hirt, Deppe and Gordon (1991, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) offered students two possible handicaps, withholding practice or reporting high stress. High self-handicapping men and women reported stress, but only men withheld practice, and when both options were open both sexes preferred the stress report to the behavioral handicap. That suggests many people reach for the excuse that costs the least.

A conceptual replication came from Alter and Forgas (2007, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology). In their study of 94 first-year psychology students, 52 percent of those given non-contingent positive feedback chose an inhibiting tea, against 26 percent after contingent feedback (N = 81 for that measure). Avoiding task-relevant practice followed the same pattern, 64 percent against 39 percent. That supports the original idea that doubt about repeating a success pushes people toward a handicap. It used tea rather than a drug and added a mood manipulation, so it is a cousin of the 1978 design rather than a rerun.

What does it cost?

Zuckerman, Kieffer and Knee (1998) tracked students over time. High self-handicappers had lower academic performance, an effect partly explained by poorer study habits, and their adjustment worsened. Zuckerman and Tsai (2005, Journal of Personality) reported four studies in which trait self-handicapping predicted a later rise in substance use and lost satisfaction with competence.

The protective move works in the short run, which is how it gets repeated. Sirois and Pychyl’s work on feeling better now at later cost describes the same trade, and chronic lateness as an identity tax shows how it ends up written into how people describe themselves.

What would count as evidence of it in your own week?

The signature is timing. A deficit that appears specifically before the events that matter, and not before the ones that do not, is a handicap candidate. Ordinary tiredness spreads itself across the calendar. A handicap lands the night before the thing that could prove something.

The research gives no recipe for stopping. What it does give is a question to ask after the next bad night: would I have minded the result less if I had slept?